Welcome to the Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility’s (ACCSR) first sustainability report.

Managing Director's Statement
About ACCSR
Defining CSR
Our Stakeholders
Our Service Offerings
Our Management Approach

Managing Director’s Statement
It is now ten years since I began my work in corporate social responsibility. My curiosity in the field began as a result of my work experiences as a public relations consultant in the 1980s and 90s for the company then known as BHP Steel. While I was busy promoting the good deeds of the steel division, the mining division was becoming quagmired in an unfolding social and environmental disaster in Papua New Guinea. That was OK Tedi. The effect on employees across the company was profound. My clients in the steel division were both dismayed and powerless. So was I.

I went back to university to try to understand it all. I read, researched, wrote papers, attended conferences and developed an international network in corporate social responsibility. One night after one such conference in 2002 I had dinner with stakeholder relations experts Ann Svendsen and Bob Boutilier in Vancouver. Both have since become important colleagues to ACCSR. Ann surprised me by serving a truly huge salmon that she had caught herself. Then she surprised me again by asking me if I was pro-business or anti-business. I’m pro-business, of course, I said. I have always tried to help business in my work. We talked for hours, and Ann’s words reminded me how much I enjoy the consulting process: solving problems creatively and making a difference for clients.

That night as I took the train back to my hotel in down town Vancouver, I started to form the idea for the Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. The mission was simple: to help business become more socially responsible. I would do it through consulting, research, teaching, advocacy work – whatever I knew business needed.

In 2003 ACCSR began trading, using the company structure I set up for my former public relations business, Synergy Communications. In 2004 I finished my doctorate in corporate social responsibility at Monash University. It was described by the leading strategy scholar, Professor Craig Fleisher, as “a positive contribution to management practice for years to come”. In 2004 I also ran ACCSR’s first public workshop on stakeholder engagement.

This report covers the period from July 1 2005 to August 31 2007. This has been a period of major growth and achievement for ACCSR. We have grown from a single person home based business to a small boutique consulting, research and training firm with significant achievements and very bright prospects.

Highlights included:

• Helping clients achieve their CSR and sustainability goals (like the first time our client Transurban was included on the DJSI leader’s list)
• Our contribution to the professionalisation of CSR through our public and in house executive development programs
• Working with international experts such as Paul Hohnen, Dr Robert Boutilier, Ann Svendsen and the ExperiencePoint team
• Playing a role in the unfolding CSR landscape in Australia through participation in public policy processes
• Growing the business and moving to a new green office

Lowlights included:

• The challenges of dealing with growth and moving to a new green office. Click here for more information.
  
• Our inability to establish the Australian region of the Global Leadership Network, an international initiative pioneered by AccountAbility and the Boston Centre for Corporate Citizenship. After spending a year developing Australian plans and promoting the program to Australian companies we will now direct any future inquiries to the global GLN team.
  
• At the end of the reporting period we bid farewell to Rebecca Jones. Rebecca joined ACCSR at the beginning of 2006 after working as an advisor to two federal parliamentarians. During her time here Rebecca contributed to all aspects of ACCSR’s work, and we supported her to complete her Master in Corporate Environmental and Sustainability Management at Monash University. Rebecca has left to pursue different opportunities and we wish her well in her future career.

In this report we have tried to present a sober account of our performance and challenges. Our commitments for the next reporting period are detailed below.

I would like to sincerely thank all the people who have shown confidence in the Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility and contributed to its success. These include staff: Kate Niblock-Siddle, Lori Cordingley and Rebecca Jones, as well as clients, workshop partners and participants, research participants and partners and valued suppliers.

Behind the scenes are the most important people who help ensure ACCSR’s success: my husband, my mother and my children.

Dr Leeora D Black
Managing Director
October 2007

About ACCSR
Established in 2003, ACCSR is a specialist CSR advisory, research, and executive development firm. Managing Director Dr Leeora Black founded the firm with the mission of supporting companies to achieve superior social performance that helps drive business success.

Adopting a capacity building approach, ACCSR helps organisations to identify and understand their social responsibilities, capacity and impact and develop strategies and tactics to reduce social risks and improve both performance and social responsiveness.

ACCSR’s approach is grounded in the disciplines of strategic management and organisational change management, applied to the field of organisation-stakeholder relations.

Defining corporate social responsibility
We define corporate social responsibility as the actions taken by an organisation to minimise negative social and environmental impacts and leverage core competencies, products or services to create positive social and environmental impacts. To be socially responsible, all organisations need to develop the five core capabilities of social responsibility: stakeholder engagement, social accountability, ethical business behaviour, dialogue and value attuned communication. Click here to read more about CSR capabilities
Companies with well developed CSR capabilities use CSR to contribute strategically to business success while building strong communities.

ACCSR’s mission is to help companies become more socially responsible through the provision of specialist advice and executive development programs. All our advice and learning programs are based on the best available empirical evidence and research.

Our Stakeholders
Our core stakeholders are our staff, our clients and workshop participants, suppliers and partners, as described below.

We also have productive relationships with other categories of stakeholders such as industry associations, the non-profit sector, environmental and social advocacy organisations and government.

Service Offering
Our service offering derives from our mission to help organisations become more socially responsible and comprises research, advisory services and learning programs.

During the reporting period we provided advisory and research services to Westpac, Transurban, McDonald’s Australia, Powercor, The Monash-CityLink-Westgate SouthernLink upgrade project, the Australian Council of Super Investors, CPA Australia, South East Water and the RACV.

Our executive learning programs support organisational capability building and the advancement of CSR professionals.

During the reporting period we provided in-house programs for ANZ, the Credit Union of Australia, The Credit Union Foundation of Australia, GPT, Australia Post, Landcom, NAB, Sensis, Transurban, CSL, the 2005 CSR Summit, The Australian Sports Commission, Melbourne Cares and the Centre for Public Agency Sustainability Reporting. We also ran nine public workshop programs on topics such as CSR strategy, CSR Communications, CSR Measurement and Stakeholder Engagement

A highlight was our first conference in February 2007, hosted by Westpac.

Our Management Approach
ACCSR is guided by four core values in the work that we do:

Further discussion of these values can be found by clicking here.

To prepare this sustainability report, ACCSR conducted an internal workshop attended by ACCSR staff. The outcomes were to clearly delineate business priorities, formally map our stakeholders and plan our sustainability report. Through our discussions, a further outcome of the workshop was to establish the mechanisms in which ACCSR would utilise data collection and reporting systems to track progress and communicate performance. As a result of this discussion we have determined in the next reporting period to review our company values, goals and results to ensure consistent alignment and improve our effectiveness in achieving our goals.

In the workshop we agreed on three goals for the company:

In our relationship with clients, and anyone else who provides personal information to ACCSR, such as registered users of ACCSR’s website, respect for privacy issues is paramount. ACCSR has no recorded complaints for breaches of privacy in the reporting period. Our research practices adhere to ethical guidelines published by the Australian Council for Research and registered users of ACCSR’s website have the option to opt-out of communication with ACCSR at their preference. Strategies for marketing and communicating ACCSR’s services also adhere to all regulatory and other standards for best practice and protecting privacy.